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Ilan Kelman (Professor of Disasters and Health, University College London)

 

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted our lives and livelihoods. Most readers here have engaged in extensive international travel, now curtailed for an extended period. Most of us expect to be able to buy what we need when we want, often being able to afford our choices without too much trouble. We expect to be able to use our income which is certainly hard-earned and deserved to go out for good food with good friends at will, an experience that is now inhibited.

 

All these are far from the reality of life experienced by most people. Even being healthy and energetic with full stomachs and plenty of drinking and washing water each day is not the typical experience of most people around the world, particularly those who will never have the opportunity to read this article. And when we do not feel so healthy, despite the difficulties with many healthcare systems, we typically have options for seeing professionals to hope for sound advice and a cure.

 

As we consider our post-pandemic world, seeking opportunities to build up and push forward global citizenship and solidarity, what does it really mean for those who do have few options to lead the efforts? For most of them, the pandemic has meant mainly fewer opportunities for livelihoods and more opportunities to die of illness.

 

A Fundamental Question

 

For me, choosing our post-pandemic world involving everyone together is fundamentally asking “What does it mean to be human?” What have we done to our society to reach this situation of calamity? What will we do better? And how do we move forward with the choices we select? Too often, we end up taking comfort in buzzwords, such as “transformation” and “resilience,” which can mean whatever we wish them to mean.

 

Regarding transformation, we have now seen it. Lockdown, travel bans, and new modes of interacting with people represent social transformation. It happened exceptionally quickly, from the end of January 2020 when parts of China started lockdown to the end of March when much of the world had adopted some level of measures. We have achieved transformation and it is not pretty.

 

For resilience, the standard assumption from ecology which has infiltrated many climate change discussions is about bouncing back, or returning, to normal. Do we really know what “normal” means? Is “normal” with or without intercontinental travel at will, with or without social media and unbroken internet connectivity, and with or without the vast amounts of food discarded by supermarkets and restaurants while people go hungry along the same street? These have been the normal in recent times, but are from the normal throughout human history.

 

I hope that we would not really want to restore normalcy after the pandemic by perpetuating the massive inequities across society fuelled by gross resource overconsumption through the exploitation of people and the environment. Why should we bounce back to the normal in which a tiny minority of people with resources and power, and without much real accountability, make decisions about the lives of everyone else? Surely we should prefer a resilience which is, in effect, the opposite of returning to the pre-pandemic “normal.”

 

Pandemic by Choice

 

Much of the pre-pandemic normality created the conditions for a pandemic in the first place and retains prospects for many more pandemics. Examples of our “normal” behaviour are the high speed and vast extent of long-distance travel, the harmful ways in which we treat ecosystems and animals thereby supporting conditions for microbes to jump species, and the gross inequities which force many to live in crowded, unhygienic conditions. That is, pandemics are more about long-term societal conditions and everyday behaviour than about a specific microbe’s traits.

 

Most fundamental is the state of and access to our health systems. Many countries do not have enough professionals, facilities, or equipment to deal with day-to-day health, never mind during a time of crisis. Some countries do not provide fully accessible healthcare to all their citizens, so people must pay for diagnosis and treatment. This chronic crisis of inadequate healthcare for everyone inevitably invites acute crises such as outbreaks.

 

Why return to this pre-pandemic state which set up this pandemic disaster and its consequences?

 

Even the more affluent countries ended up with a dire choice. One choice, taken by many jurisdictions, was to implement lockdown. Society’s functions were overturned in such a way that those most vulnerable and marginalised, and who had the fewest options to improve their situation, ended up even more vulnerable and even more marginalised. The alternative was to permit the virus to spread with a horrendous death rate and again tending to hit worst those who are most vulnerable and marginalised, with the fewest options to improve their situation.

 

With choices limited to complete lockdown, mass death, or somewhere in between these two extremes, we have lost already, because nowhere on this axis supports being human. This is not a state we should recover to, when pandemic prevention is possible instead.

 

Consider, too, what happened in those places which chose an extensive lockdown. Without disputing the thousands of lives (or more) which a lockdown saved, we must be aware of the mental health consequences, such as increased stress, self-harm including suicide attempts, domestic violence, and substance use. All these are poorly treated epidemics within society anyway, depicting yet another normal to which we should never return.

 

Being human means wanting to solve them; it does not mean stigmatising mental health conditions, brushing over or excusing everyday violence, and creating livelihoods and compensation which are about squeezing the humanity out from the worker ants so that those who do not need it, accumulate even more wealth.

 

We have constructed systems in which, each year, the world spends more than ten times on defence budgets (basically, weapons for intimidating, harming, and killing) than we spend on official international aid. Notwithstanding all the problems with the international aid system, at least it tries to help people. Meanwhile, governments use our tax money to subsidise the fossil fuel industry at perhaps two orders of magnitude more than governments invest in all forms of disaster prevention, including for pandemics.

 

Citizenship and Solidarity

 

So, what does it mean to be human? Here is where the importance of citizenship and solidarity shines.

 

Citizenship does not refer to having the passport of a country. It embraces the individual, accepting their rights and duties as a constructively contributing member of society to the best of their ability. Ask for help when needed and help others when possible. Enjoy the privileges of living oneself while fulfilling obligations to others. Retain opportunities to have fun without neglecting the hard, dedicated work required to keep society functioning.

 

Solidarity is not about a specific ideology or opposing one. It is about one catchphrase of the pandemic that “We are all in this together.” We are all human beings together, aiming to stop others from suffering. Responsibilities and freedoms coincide, aiming for the same availability for everyone. As humans, we need to join forces to work with and for each other, against the ravages of lethal viruses and inequities.

 

Not all of us have the options to consider citizenship and solidarity, indicating the need for those who can to generate the opportunities for others. Are disasters such as pandemics one such impetus? Are we rallying around the concept of being human of being human collectively?

 

Sadly, not always, as seen through examining pandemic diplomacy as one element of the wider concept of disaster diplomacy. Disaster diplomacy analyses how and why disasters might create new peace and cooperation initiatives. In general, unfortunately, they do not, with the same conclusion reached for disease diplomacy.

 

From a top-down perspective, during the COVID-19 pandemic, too many countries and governments used the virus and the lockdown to either pursue cooperation, something they wanted anyway, or to gain advantage over rivals and to ferment conflict which is useful for them. It is a sad conclusion that disaster diplomacy simply does not succeed in the long-term. Instead, the interests of those with power have too often been about themselves without fully considering the negative impacts on others.

 

Even the typical vocabulary of the pandemic shows our baseline. The phrase “social distancing” has stuck, rather than using the more accurate “physical distancing” which communicates the important premise that we must remain as social as possible without physical proximity. We heard plenty of talk about the “exit strategy” from lockdown rather than an “entrance strategy” to a better civilization and a better humanity as the choice for our post-pandemic world.

 

More optimistically, from a bottom-up perspective, so many people ignored the petty politics driven by self-interest. They reached out to their fellow humans to build a better world.

 

Throughout it all, health professionals, utility workers, transportation staff, cleaners, trash collectors, those in the food industry, and so many others continued going to work on-site to keep systems up and running for us. Far too many of them died from COVID-19 because lack of preparedness put them at risk, followed by inadequate responses to protect them until it was too late.

 

This awful way in which essential workers have been treated by the governments they serve mirrors the awful way in which many within the most marginalised populations have been systematically denied basic healthcare and measures to keep themselves safe, during and irrespective of the pandemic. Such mistreatment, though, can happen only in places where these services actually exist. Too many people still suffer the pandemic of lacking basic needs such as clean water, sanitation, hygiene, shelter, community, healthcare, food, education, and many others. We do not wish to re-create this condition of perpetual illness.

 

Cure All Pandemics

 

This rampant disease of inequity and inadequate access to basic services can be cured through applying global citizenship and solidarity. For citizenship, if we are not helping ourselves and each other, while being helped by others, then we will simply continue with all the problems identified so clearly. As for solidarity, we are all in this together since injustice to one person or group harms us all. This double-edged cure will contribute to preventing microbe-based pandemics and to resolving the societal problems which created the 2020 pandemic.

 

To answer the question “What does it mean to be human?” we must choose this post-pandemic world, which favours prevention over cure in ethos and in action. Then, through citizenship and solidarity, we will be tackling the long-term, chronic ills that plague us. From functioning and accessible health systems to mutually beneficial interactions with ecosystems and species, we can do much better than the long-term, baseline conditions which created the 2020 pandemic.

 

We know that new infectious agents with the potential to kill us are inevitable, but that pandemic disasters are not. It is up to us to create this post-pandemic world by being human.

 

(Twitter/Instagram @ILANKELMAN)

 

URL:

(No.4) Choosing Our Post-Pandemic World > EIU in the World - APCEIU (unescoapceiu.org)